Africana.com: Houston’s Song, From the Heart

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    Africana.com: Houston’s Song, From the Heart

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    Houston’s Song, From the Heart
    By Felicia Johnson-Leblanc

    Song - could a singer have been born with a more fitting name? Maybe “Music”? No, it’s not pretty enough. Or “Lyric”? I actually know a rapper with that name; it’s more suited to the spirit of an MC. Song. It’s perfect.

    A song is the embodiment of the singer’s emotions and thoughts, all that she tries to convey to her audience. It moves you to dance, cry, light fires. It brings messages of love and happiness, joy and pain. It can be a call to revolution, a praise song to the Most High, or, all too often, a lover’s lament.

    Very few singers can reach an audience with the intensity of the great ones. Even fewer get the chance to reach the masses with their message. And among those lucky few, who can claim bragging rights to such a dope name? A little dread-locked girl from H-Town by way of Motown named Song Williamson holds that title, and her debut album In the Fireplace has heads all over the country reeling in the wake of her powerful voice.

    Song’s music is mellow and rhythmic. Her voice, a strong alto with mountainous ranges, is the blues revisited. The songs she sings are of the new school of R&B—funky, eclectic, deep. Her style will remind you of Erykah or Chaka from Rufus days, but the way her voice resonates throughout the room with feeling makes Phyllis Hyman the only suitable comparison.

    I first heard Song in 1995 in the back room of the Magic Bus, a hole-in-the-wall hip hop club in midtown Houston. She was fronting for a poetry performance group called Roots Collective and she brought tears to folks’ eyes with her soulful wailing. Soon after that, she hooked up with Houston rap producer Clay “Fresh” James and the newly formed Bayswater Records. Fresh helped season Song’s talent, providing music that is melodic and thoughtful, smooth and mellifluous, a perfect background for the power of Song’s incredible lyrics.

    “I’m a lover of live band music, you know,” Song told me when we talked over the phone about her new album. “I love the added excitement. Magical stuff happens when you get a bunch of people together. To me, music is a connection to God, so it’s very spiritual when there’s a bunch of people on stage and they’re exchanging that kind of energy. Like whew, you know? Like you do in church you say wow and thinking about it right now makes me say that, ooh yeah! I like what D’Angelo’s doing right now. He’s bringing back all the old funk styles. That live band, you know? When people start hearing it and seeing it again, people understand why people love music.”

    Song was born in Detroit, and moved to Houston at the age of 14, where the culture shock of the South hit hard. “I learned Houston on two different levels,” she said. “I thought Houston was multi-diverse – Indian, Asian, Mexican. I met a lot of poets from those [cultures] and I had this thing: ‘Music is universal,’ ‘Poetry is universal.’ That taught me a lot,” she said. “It cultivated my personality.” Song left Houston for Austin, where she attended Huston-Tillotson University. It was there, while working at a club that she fell in love with the art of live performance. “I was into law when I first got to Huston-Tillotson,” she says. But hanging out with the musicians awakened a latent love for music. “Once I got into music it was a whole new world for me. When I got back to Houston, I was full of energy. I was ready.”

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    Felicia Johnson-Leblanc is a Houston-based arts writer.

    Photo courtesy of Bayswater Records.



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